Ai Weiwei

Britain performed an about-face Friday and granted a six-month visa to dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, apologizing for rejecting his application over an alleged criminal conviction. On Thursday Ai disclosed that the British embassy in Beijing had turned down his request for a business visa, saying he had failed to disclose a criminal conviction. Instead it gave him a visa covering 20 days in September, when a major exhibition of Ai's work is opening at London's Royal Academy. Ai, who often uses his work to draw attention to corruption and injustices in Chinese society, was jailed for almost three months in 2011 amid a wider crackdown on dissent in China. His company was later...

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Admitting that someone had blundered, the British government has reversed its decision earlier this week to deny Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei a six-month work visa and issued an apology to the artist-activist who has become a symbol for freedom of...

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Cheryl Haines sat with China's dissident artist and activist Ai Weiwei in his Beijing studio in 2012 — not long after his release from 81 days in secret detention. She could tell he was suffering.
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Ai Weiwei, arguably China’s best-known artist, spent 81 days in prison in 2011, so he knows about incarceration. That's part of the reason he is helming an exhibit opening this month on San Francisco's Alcatraz Island.
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Chinese artist Ai Weiwei spent most of the 1980s and early 1990s in the United States — primarily in New York but also in California. As he prepares to open the new show "@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz" in September, he's a tad regretful that...

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Among the keenly observed moments in the new documentary about Ai Weiwei is an exchange between the artist, under house arrest in China on trumped-up charges, and his mother. "If this was 1957 they would have killed you already," she tells...

Welcome to Round-up: the once-a-week digest of interesting, important and just plain provocative arts and culture stories -- seasoned with bits of Web weirdness. Want to submit a link for consideration? Best bet is to tweet me.
There is an Ai...

For more than a year, a portion of my apartment complex in Beijing has been a construction zone; squat, old buildings have been razed, and new towers are sprouting in their stead. The area is blocked off by walls covered with large, professionally printed...

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The...